Eduardo Mendieta

Eduardo Mendieta was born in Colombia, but was raised in the United States. He has received degrees from Rutgers University, Union Theological Seminary and the New School. He also studied in Germany, at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, where he worked with Jürgen Habermas. He has edited and translated from Spanish the works of one of Latin America's most important living philosophers — Enrique Dussel. He has also edited and translated from the German work of the innovative philosopher Karl-Otto Apel. Over the last decade he has edited about a dozen books dealing with the Frankfurt School, contemporary Latin American philosophy, and issues relating to religion, globalization, and global justice. His most recent book is entitled Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latin Americanisms, and Critical Theory (SUNY, 2007), and is presently finishing another book on philosophy and war entitled Philosophy's War: Nomos, Topos, Polemos. He has served on the editorial boards of City, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Constellations, and Sophia. He was the executive editor of Radical Philosophy Review until 2007, and founding member of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter of Hispanics in Philosophy.

Most recently he published a collection of political interviews with Richard Rorty entitled Take Care of Freedom, and Truth Will take Care of Itself (Stanford University Press, 2006), as well as book of interviews with radical philosopher and prison activist Angela Y. Davis dealing with Abu Ghraib, mass incarceration in the United States, and torture as a weapon of the state, entitled Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Torture and War (Seven Stories Press, 2006). Prof. Mendieta has also been working on what he likes to call "philosophical animals." At the center of this recent project are two simple questions: can we ever divorce the question of the human from the question of the animals, and can philosophy not invent its own 'philosophical animals' in order to answer the prior question? Mendieta claims that "the metaphorics of humanity is entwined with the metaphorics of animality." In this project, however, Prof. Mendieta aims to complicate this picture by introducing the issue of biotechnology and genomics: does not the future of transgenic organisms, both vegetable and animal, make all too evident what has already being at play in the history of nature: namely a swapping and sharing of genes that have allowed us to co-evolve as "genomic companion species." So along with customary bestiaries that accompany philosophical investigations about the nature of the human, we have now to consider the already well-populated transgenic zoos of biotechnological chimeras of the genomic age.